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A photo of a fetus said to be aborted at nine months against its Chinese mother's will has attracted wide attention on the Internet after it was first published last week, with critics insisting the photo and its story are typical of China's brutal one-child policy.

The graphic image shows an unidentified person in a hospital reportedly in Moshan, China standing next to a large red bucket in which a baby's body is partially seen floating in blood and water. PrisonPlanet.com first posted the photo via the Chinese Weibo.com social networking platform, and according to the website, the baby belonged to a Chinese couple forced to have an abortion because they already had one child. In accordance with China's one-child law, subsequent babies are reportedly often forcefully aborted and thousands of abortions happen every year.

The one-child law is a form of population control implemented by the Chinese government in 1979 in order to address the rising population -- according to sources, the country's population rose from 694.6 million in 1964 to over 1 billion in 1982. The law does not affect all residents in China, as some regions are exempt from the rule, as are foreign nationals living in the country.

The policy, however, permits full-term forced abortions and, according to the PrisonPlanet.com report, the baby in the photo was alive and crying when it was delivered. Because of complications due to hemorrhaging, the mother reportedly died soon after as well.

"The mother was injected with a poison that induced an abortion, but after the baby was 'pulled out inhumanly like a piece of meat,' it was still alive and began to cry before doctors slung the defenseless child into a bucket and left it to die," the article claims.

Additional details of the story have revealed that the woman was allegedly kidnapped by members of the "Birth Control Office" branch of the government, and about half a dozen men pinned the mother down and injected her with a drug to induce labor.

"Sometimes the women themselves die along with their full-term babies. Forced abortion is China's war against women. It is official government rape," said Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, in an email to LifeNews.com after viewing the photo.

"It is still happening today. Also infanticide is practiced in China. Late-term babies are injected with poison in their skulls or drowned in buckets. If the Chinese Communist Party wants to be a respected member of the international community, it must stop forced abortion and infanticide.

"The Chinese Communist Party has tried to convince the world that it is softening its One-Child Policy. The photo demonstrates that this is a lie. To this day, the One-Child Policy is enforced through forced abortion, forced sterilization and infanticide," she asserted.

According to abortion statistics published on All Girls Allowed's website, 13 million abortions are performed in China each year, which is close to 35,000 a day. All Girls Allowed, whose faith-based mission is "to restore life, value, and dignity to girls and mothers, and to reveal the injustice of China's One-Child Policy," claims the policy, which favors male children, has led to female gendercide, abandonment of daughters, child trafficking and violations of women's reproductive rights.